Firecrawl’s co -founder and CEO Caleb Peffer knew the exact moment he found the investor to lead his Serie A.
He was at a coffee meeting with Nexus Venture Partners Abhishek Sharma at Blue Bottle in San Francisco’s South Park (a favorite -VC residence). While describing the company’s future, he moved so animated that his chair tilted over.
“I actually fell out of my chair. And Abhishek, as a big investor does, caught the chair and me when I fell,” Peffer described with a laugh. It felt like a symbol of how the founder/investor relationship should work. “I think it was a clear signal that he was the real partner.”
On Tuesday, Firecrawl announced a Serie A led by Nexus with the participation of Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and the existing investor and combinator.
Firecrawl offers a popular open source web crawler for developers and AI agents with a commercially supported version available via API. It is used by 350,000 developers, has nearly 50,000 stars on GitHub, and its remarkable customers include Shopify, Replit and Zapier as well as “some of the largest hedge funds in the world,” Peffer told Techcrunch. And, he says, the company is already profitable.
The startup also released just an API that supports search and will soon add support to natural languages PROMPS, as co -founder and CTO Nicolas Silberstein Camara noted.
Peffer, who co -founded fireworks in 2022 with Camara and CMO Eric Ciarla, said to win Lütke as an investor was “the best kind of validation.”
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They landed him through a Gutsy email after discovering that the Shopify founder had signed up to try their product through their self-service portal.
“We saw his e email coming in,” Peffer said. The Firecrawl crew immediately sent him e -mail to welcome him as a customer, but got no answer. Two months later, some Shopify people contacted Firecrawl for a business contract. So Peffer took his shot and emailed Lütke again and mentioned that they would love for him to participate in their upcoming round.
This time Lütke replied with compliments about their product. He was in.
While AI -Webcrawlers have a somewhat questionable reputation these days, mostly because of bad actors ignoring Robot.txt files, they are also a necessary part of the budding AI world. AI trains on the web, agents must access web pages to perform their tasks, and companies need personalized crawlers to consume their own sites for training and operation.
Firecrawl founders also hope to help tackle the frustrating parts of their industry. They are working on tools to help site owners, publishers and other content creators “Get paid when AI uses their content. We think that’s how it should be,” Peffer said.
While there have been plenty of efforts about this idea from big names like Adobe and Getty as well as startups like Bria, Calliope Networks and others, Peffer feels that Firecrawl has an edge because it already works with those scraping data.
“We already have one side of the market,” he said. “What we want to do is just connect that side of the market to site owners, the publishers.”
Interestingly, Firecrawl also became viral a few months ago for grounds that have suffered to do with their open source tool. They had sent an ad to the YC Job Board who wants to hire an AI agent as an employee of a salary of $ 15,000 – maybe the first job ad for an agent employee ever.
This job search did not give an agent to a value of hiring, so the fireworks raised the budget to get $ 1 million to hire more agents and developers who built them and tried again. Applicants flooded, Peffer said, but the company has not yet hired anyone. The founders realized that the evaluation and management of wanna-be agent staff is a job in themselves. So now they are looking for an AI staff manager.
Firecrawls Peffer will be on stage at Disrupt in October to discuss everything he has learned in a session that covers the advantages and disadvantages of hiring AI agents as early employees.